You’ve got a friend in candid memoir
Women’s friendships tend to be deeper, more complicated than men’s.
Tell a man about a disappointment or a falling out with a female friend, and he might shrug and say, “Why are you making such a big deal over nothing?” or “It’s just a friend.”
For many women, there’s no such thing as “just a friend.”
We want our friends to be there for us, accept us as we are, and be as open with us as we are with them. Such friendships allow us — and our friends — to grow, often in ways we might never have expected.
In She Matters, Susanna Sonnenberg writes lyrically and candidly about the female friends who have helped define her. Some of these friendships have endured for decades; others have faltered or ended badly.
Sonnenberg is more than a gifted stylist; she’s gutsy. She describes situations that will make many female readers cringe in recognition, such as her “vigilance in certain neighbourhoods” as she tries to avoid a woman with whom she was once close.
In a previous book, Her Last Death, Sonnenberg wrote about her relationship with her mother, a cocaine addict with whom she severed ties. In She Matters, Sonnenberg acknowledges how that relationship has coloured her friendships, making her “leery of women.”
Leery, yes, but also fascinated by women and the ways in which we can sustain — or harm — each other.
At the start of this book, Sonnenberg is 47, mourning the loss of her father. (It’s unclear why she never names him, saying only he was an editor of some repute; a rudimentary Google search reveals he was Ben Sonnenberg, editor of the literary journal Grand Street.) Sonnenberg tells us she is “shedding people,” an experience many women have as we age, becoming choosier about our friends, discarding those with whom we no longer have enough in common, or who have failed us in an essential way.
Sonnenberg examines the friendships that marked various phases of her life. There’s Jessica Ribicoff, her closest friend from sleep-away camp, whom, after many years, she reconnects with on Facebook. When the two women meet, the conversation is forced, awkward. Sonnenberg finds herself looking for “the precious memory-girl,” only to realize that girl is gone and exists only in Sonnenberg’s memory — but that is OK.
Then there’s Abigail, a friend from boarding school, a girl three years Sonnenberg’s senior whom she idolized: “I had a crush on her competence.” When 16-year-old Sonnenberg takes up with her 34-year-old, married English teacher, Abigail does not try to talk her out of it. Instead of protecting her younger friend, Abigail is complicit, agreeing to let Sonnenberg use her name during off-campus trips.
Later, after Sonnenberg moves to Montana and has two sons, her closest friends are other mothers. They include Ellen, a lawyer with a reserved nature: “the one I called when I felt my bitchiest … depleted and overwhelmed, who groaned and laughed with me.” The friendship falters when, on a night that Sonnenberg feels overwhelmed and her husband is away, she phones Ellen and invites herself and her boys for supper; Ellen says no. It takes several years before Sonnenberg understands that “you can’t ask your friend to fill up the holes left gaping by two selfish parents.”
The memoirist’s advantage is that she gets to tell her side of the story. We’ll never know what Jessica Ribicoff, Abigail and Ellen make of Sonnenberg. At the very least, it’s clear she is a demanding friend — as well as one who takes notes.
The best chapters in this book are not about Sonnenberg’s enduring friendships, or the satisfactions of the “deeply known friend”; rather, they are the chapters in which Sonnenberg looks hard at her own failings. She recalls judging her friend April, who left her longtime girlfriend for someone else: “I didn’t approve of her choice. There was no other way to put it.” This judgment caused the friendship to falter and the two lost touch. Sonnenberg admits it was only after her own extramarital affair that she understood how wrong she’d been to condemn April. Big-hearted, April remained open to the friendship. Sonnenberg makes the happy discovery that “the friendship had only been in hibernation.”
Many of the friends Sonnenberg writes about are fellow writers or artists. Yet she never mentions how she handles feelings of jealousy and competition. Her reticence suggests this might have made for rich material.
In the end, it’s not the particulars of Sonnenberg’s friendships that will stay with readers — it’s more the nature of her inquiry. Readers will be left considering the friendships, both good and bad, that have marked our lives and helped create the women we have become.
After she has brunch at April’s apartment in New York, Sonnenberg offers to clear the dishes. In this book’s simplest, loveliest paean to friendship, April tells her: “Leave them. … When you’ve gone, they’ll make me happy that you were here.”